Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult is a three-part docuseries, directed by Chris Smith, about how Hoyt Richards, who became one of the first male supermodels in the 1980s, lived almost a double life as part of the Eternal Values cult, led by a New York socialite and lifestyle guru named Frederick von Mierers.
Opening Shot: Video of Hoyt Richards talking to a documentary filmmaker in 2001 about his time in the Eternal Values cult.
The Gist: An interview with Richards, now in his sixties, is the centerpiece of the Bring Me The Beauties, but Chris Smith also talks to other members of Eternal Values, many of whom have as many positive memories of van Mierers than negative. But the series is centered mostly on Richards and his time with the cult.
We start in 1978 when Richards was 16 and vacationing with his family in Nantucket, which is where he meets von Mierers for the first time. Von Mierers was a socialite from New York that seemed to know everyone, and he was into some spiritual leanings, some eastern philosophy, as well as astrology and hororscopes.
Once Richards started college at Princeton, playing football and doing a lot of what college kids do, he was invited by von Mierersto party with him at places like Studio 54, and to meet other members of his group. He was also invited to van Mieres’ apartment, which was lavishly and colorfully decorated and seemed to house most of the members of the group he had just been dancing with.
One of the things van Mierers espoused was to have fun but to live clean: No drugs or alcohol, no sex, eating right, etc. He also believed that he was a “space alien” that “walked in” to his body sometime in the 1970s, and wrote a book about “walk-ins” that raised his profile. The docuseries used extensive audio and video footage of van Mierers espousing this in radio interviews and on his own cable access show.
After Richards was diagnosed with a shoulder injury that kept him off the football field, van Mierers used his contacts to get him modeling jobs. Richards’ profile skyrocketed by the mid 1980s and he became one of the first male supermodels. Yet his family was worried over his behavior, and most of the money he made as a model was handed over to van Mieres.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult is similar to any number of docuseries about cults, like The Vow.
Our Take: The first episode of Bring Me The Beauties: The Model Cult does what a lot of docuseries about cults do in the first episode: It sets up what the organization is about and profiles its charismatic leader before going into everything that made the group into a cult, including the horrific behavior of that leader and his/her acolytes. The problem with the first episode is that it doesn’t go far enough in describing just how problematic van Mierers and his cult really was.
Was van Mierers quirky? Sure. Did the dichotomy of spending all night at Studio 54 but not partaking in any of the carnal pleasures there ring strange? Absolutely, as was the glamorous lifestyle Richards led while on modeling jobs but the spartan existence he led at van Mieres’s plush gulag of an apartment.
We see plenty of footage from the group’s cable access show spouting fairly boilerplate notions about health and mindfulness that may have seemed unusual for the “go-go” eighties but wasn’t out of line with what others from that era talked about — let’s just say the line between what van Mierers talked about and what RIchard Simmons would say to his Sweatin’ To The Oldies participants was pretty fine.
In fact, there wasn’t much about what we heard about in the first episode that even sounded alarming, aside from the “slamming” sessions that consisted of members screaming insults at other members. Van Mierers was often capricious and random in his behavior, but that by itself doesn’t indicate that he’s a cult leader.
The part that was more interesting was his belief in aliens “walking into” the bodies of humans, and that many of American history’s luminaries were “walk-ins”. That got a fair amount of exploration in the first episode, and that is the part that indicates how cultish van Mierers was, and we hope to see more of that in the other two episodes.
Performance Worth Watching: Hoyt Richards is the most dominant voice on this show, and it’s facinating how much of a blandly blank slate he was back in the early ’80s, perfect for someone like van Mierers to mold.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Jacki Adams, a model who joined Eternal Values only to get kicked out when she and van Mierers’ right-hand man had an affair, says “I did not want to keep silent.”
Sleeper Star: Adams is the one who looks like she’s going to blow the whistle on the goings on in Eternal Values, and it’ll be interesting to see how she goes about exposing van Mierers
Most Pilot-y Line: There are some brief reenactment scnes that seem unnecessary, given how much footage there is of Richards and van Mierers.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of Bring Me The Beauties: The Model Cult needed to give some more information about van Mierers’ beliefs and how the “beuties” he recruited to his cause were so taken in my him.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
